Elmore Leonard: Djibouti

"You gonna shoot the hurricane's on its way?"

"I may as well."

"Bringin the Gulf of Mexico up the river. You gonna need a tall man to hump equipment, keep it dry."

"And a second cameraman," Dara said.

By the time they were shooting what was left of the Ninth Ward, Xavier was aiming a shoulder-mounted Sony at people sitting on top their homes, Xavier seeing their despair and hoping to catch it on film. Later on he sat in on the editing of these scenes and watched Dara give it her touch, eliminating his smash close-up of a woman's face to treat her more gently, the woman on her roof holding a child. Xavier would look at Dara's cut and see what it was like to be that woman.

He went to Hollywood with Dara for the Oscar show.

She even brought him onstage to stand next to her in his tux Dara borrowed from one of the Lakers, Xavier looking down at the top of her blond hair, done to slant across the corner of her eye. He thought Dara looked like a movie star. Even had on makeup. Dara in a black gown pasted on her slim body. She looked to Xavier like she was supposed to look. It seemed natural to her, like the hot chick was inside the documentary film shooter waiting to make her move. She held up Oscar, raised him over her head as she thanked her sponsors. Then brought Oscar down and thanked her cameraman Xavier LeBo, saying his name in a slow way as she looked up at him. "Xavier kept talking to me, asking if I was quick enough to shoot a hundred-and-fifty-mile-an-hour hurricane going by." Dara said, holding up Oscar again, "Xavier deserves some of this award."

Xavier said, walking off with Dara, "You right that time." DARA MADE UP HER mind they were going to East Africa to get the real stuff, pirates in action boarding merchant ships. "And talk to them," Dara said, "get their side, the entire shipping world against them. We'll head south along the Somali coast to-wherever they're holding the ships."

"Eyl," Xavier said, "on the Indian Ocean. Gonna need a trawler, a deep-sea fishin boat cleaned up, can take any kind of sea. I get it ready, stock provisions-for how long?"

"A month at least. Where do we get the boat?"

"Djibouti, at the crossroads of us and the Arabs. Leave Djibouti, you in the Gulf of Aden lookin for pirates. Us and warships from around the world, all out there like we know what we doin."

"You've read about the pirates?"

"You say we goin to Somaliland I read everything's been written about pirates. The past few months the Internet's heavy with pirate shit and the different navies after 'em."

"I'll print out the latest stuff and read it on the plane," Dara said. "I imagine we go to Paris first."

"Connect there to Djibouti. Air France or Daallo, you want to travel with the natives. You have a name for the movie?"

"Modern-Day Pirates."

"About stock and bond salesmen?"

"You like Djibouti?"

"That has a sound to it, yeah. I'll give you one, The Evil Solution."

"You're kidding."

"One of the pirates called it that. Man name of Shamun, head of the gang that took the Saudi tanker-seven times bigger than the Titanic. He said when evil is the only solution…No, he said they have to get Somalia to settle down first, with a gover'ment can go after the pirates when they ashore. He said get rid of the foreign boats fishin these waters and you rid of the foreign navies watchin over them. He said if they busy with fishin boats they can't protect the ships haulin goods. Shamun said, 'So they become our fish.'"

"It's not a bad line," Dara said.

"You want to hear what else he said? 'What we doin might be evil, hijackin their ships. But if evil's the only solution'-where I stole the title-'then we do evil.' This is a man in the middle of all this shit goin down, calls it The Evil Solution."

"It only works," Dara said, "if the audience knows whose point of view it is. Otherwise it sounds like a Sherlock Holmes title."

"All right, you come up with the name of your picture," Xavier said. "I won't worry my head about it."

"Are you packed?"

"Leavin tomorrow." He said, "How about Dara Barr's African Adventure? Have natives bangin on tribal drums."

"I was thinking of laying in drums," Dara said.

"Good, you gettin yourself in the mood," Xavier said. "I'll see you next week in Djibouti."

DARA WAS OUT ON the Buster twenty-seven days.

She caught a ride on a supply plane off the carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower and was back in Djibouti three days before Xavier arrived on the Buster. It gave her time to put together a rough cut with the beginning of an idea, a theme. SHE WAS IN HER suite at the Kempinski Palace again looking at happy-pirate footage on her seventeen-inch MacBook Pro. She had Idris Mohammed in his Mercedes trailing dust in the moonlight. She had Idris at the tiller of a Yahama-powered skiff trailing a high wake; Idris in sunglasses, a yellow scarf around his head; Idris and his Coast Guard boys going out to hijack a ship.

She liked the rhythm of the edit: pirate skiffs getting a beat going with quick cuts to faces she thought of as rimshots coming in a flow of action and gone. She cut much of the shipping footage: cargo ships and tankers in extreme long shots, too far away to tell if they were moving. She kept most of the navy ships and helicopters, the few she had: a dozen countries out patrolling the Gulf of Aden, but try to find them. She did have the light plane attempting to drop bags of ransom on the deck of an oil tanker, and missing. Several pirates drowned trying to retrieve the loot. One washed ashore with $153,000 tied in his shirt. There were clips that had too much lead she'd trim to get in and get out. An excess of scenery to cut: long shots of villages on the Somali coast. She'd keep Eyl, Eyl was the stuff, drama developing that she hadn't expected.

Dara thought of a place for the cooch dancers shaking their pongee bums at blinding speed. If she were to take them out of the Djibouti sequence, show pirate faces in a moving skiff, eyes half-closed in the wind, a wad of khat in their jaws, and cut to the cooch dancers?

She thought, Aren't you clever? Lose the poetic fucking around and keep the girls where they belong, in Djibouti.

Xavier had brought several bouquets of khat aboard in dry ice. He told her it was ghat in Yemen, jaad sometimes in Somalia, Kenya shipping twenty tons of khat to Somalia every day. In a population of seven or eight million-women and children not chewing or getting much of a chance-that left a million males with wads in their cheeks. How much was that, two pounds a day each? Ask Xavier.

She had questioned his bringing a pistol aboard. She said, "None of the freighters are armed. It's international law."

"But if they had guns," Xavier said, "they wouldn't get hijacked, would they? Nobody's gonna take the Buster from us."

She worked at a dining table the hotel brought in and watched the entire twelve hours of footage on her laptop while she waited for Xavier. She would edit it down to their first two weeks at sea: to Idris's party at his home in Eyl; the fun-loving pirates turning against them, not so loving anymore; and finally, meeting Jama, the African American al Qaeda Muslim who becomes a one-man gang. Most of Jama would come later.

By the time she finished editing, still not sure now what the documentary was about, she had a feeling she could make it work. It was alive, it was about what was going on right now in the Middle East. She would look at footage with Xavier and hear his ideas, what he thought could be the theme. He'd say it looked like two different stories. What did she have to hold the whole thing together? What was it about?

She had spent four weeks with Xavier in a thirty-foot boat. Apart only three days and she couldn't wait to see him again; he'd become part of her life. If he were thirty-seven years younger she might even be in love with him. Maybe. She thought about a young version of Xavier.